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The Importance of Protecting Biotech R&D

We all know that the biotech industry is crucially important to the development of new medicines, so one might think that biotech companies all have large R&D operations that are actively working to develop new drugs. Surprisingly - and alarmingly - that’s not the case.

It has long been true that small startup biotech companies, many of them based on technologies developed at universities, provide the fertile soil where new drugs are germinated. And that these small companies are frequently acquired by big pharma, in order to feed their drug development pipeline.

What’s new, according to Michael Kinch and his colleagues at Yale University, is that many of the “big pharma” companies doing the acquiring turn out to have very limited internal R&D capability of their own. In other words, they are out-sourcing not only the risky early phase of drug development, but also their entire drug development infrastructure.

Kinch concluded that "this raises concerns that the R&D infrastructure for drug development could be progressively and perhaps irreversibly shrinking and that our ability to discover and/or develop new medicines is being progressively dismantled”.

This is scary stuff. For example: where are new antibiotics for drug-resistant super bugs like MRSA going to come from? Given the limited availability of venture funding for early-stage biotech companies, its probably not realistic to count on startups to fill the gap.

Part of the solution may be to increase public-private partnerships between pharma and academic institutions (where the focus is on discovery and early stage R&D), while also increasing support for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which remains the most important driver of scientific innovation and new idea creation in biotechnology.